Author: Helena

Meyer’s memoirs

I wish I’d been in London to grab the first copies of the Guardian’s version of Sir Christopher Meyer’s memoirs. Sure, I know I could have gotten them on-line just as fast– or faster. But still, there’s something delicious about ink on paper.
Here is the Guardian’s portal to the serialization.
I think it’s unprecedented for a recently retired British ambassador to publish such a frank memoir about his recent service. I seem to recall that the Blair government tried to prevent publication of the whole book (which isn’t out yet, I don’t think.) But here, anyway, are the first parts of the serialization.
The main highlight so far is the considered judgment of this seasoned diplomat that Blair had potential leverage with Bush that he could have used to win a better war plan– but that Blair failed to use it.
This, from one of yesterday’s excerpts:

    By the early autumn of 2002, despite Blair’s earlier expressions of unconditional support, Britain should have made its participation in any war dependent on a fully worked-out plan, agreed by both sides, for the rehabilitation of Iraq after Saddam’s demise.
    This would have been the appropriate quid pro quo for Blair’s display of “cojones”. We may have been the junior partner in the enterprise, but the ace up our sleeves was that America did not want to go it alone. Had Britain so insisted, Iraq after Saddam might have avoided the violence that may yet prove fatal to the entire enterprise. Unfortunately, and unavoidably, at precisely this moment, political energy in London had become consumed by a titanic struggle to keep public opinion, parliament and the Labour party onside for war. There was little energy left in No 10 to think about the aftermath. Since Downing Street drove Iraq policy, efforts made by the Foreign Office to engage with the Americans on the subject came to nothing.

He then suggests clearly that the “diplomatic” advice Blair was getting from the Foreign Office was crowded out in Balir’s mind by the more “seductive” kinds of info he was getting from his military and intel people…

    The more interesting question is whether No 10, relying heavily – maybe too heavily – on the views of these military and intelligence advisers, as a consequence underestimated its political leverage and ability to affect the course of events. I believe the US and the UK would have stood a better chance of going to war in good order had they planned the campaign not for the spring of 2003, but the autumn – the next spell of cool weather in Iraq.
    Besides giving more time to prepare for the aftermath of war, a more deliberate timetable might have made it possible to reach agreement on a second UN resolution. Once that happened, Saddam would have known the game was up. It might have sufficiently ratcheted up the pressure to lead to a coup against him or his flight into exile.
    I never interpreted the French refusal to accept the draft of a second resolution as a refusal for ever and a day. In diplomacy, you never say never. Talking to me in private, French officials accuse America and Britain of deliberately exaggerating France’s position to justify going to war without further UN cover. We will know the full truth only when the archives are opened.
    Crucially, a slower timetable for war would have avoided that frantic search for a “smoking gun” between December 2002 and the outbreak of war. By going down that road, the Americans and British shifted the burden of proof from Saddam to themselves. We had to show that he was guilty. This turned out to be a strategic error, which to this day, in the absence of WMD, continues cruelly to torment Blair and Bush.
    It was precisely these pressures which led to the mistakes and misjudgments of the two British dossiers on Saddam’s WMD.
    Enormous controversy surrounds the intelligence on which Blair and Bush relied. I saw a great deal of intelligence material in 2002, and I was myself persuaded that Iraq had WMD.
    There is nothing of which I am aware that Blair said publicly about the intelligence for which he did not have cover either from the joint intelligence committee (JIC) or from its chairman, John Scarlett. If either succumbed to political pressure, that is another story.
    Had I been in Alastair Campbell’s place, I too would have wanted as categorical a public depiction of Saddam’s threat as possible. Equally I would have expected the JIC to be rigorous in telling me how far I could go.
    Tony Blair chose to take his stand against Saddam and alongside Bush from the highest of high moral ground. It is the definitive riposte to the idea that Blair was merely the president’s poodle, seduced though he and his team always appeared to be by the proximity and glamour of American power.But the high moral ground, and the pure white flame of unconditional support to an ally in service of an idea, have their disadvantages.
    They place your destiny in the hands of the ally. They fly above the tangled history of Sunni, Shia and Kurd. They discourage descent into the dull detail of tough and necessary bargaining: meat and drink to Margaret Thatcher, but, so it seemed, uncongenial to Tony Blair.

Well, lots more to read and reflect on there. But I need to run.

Incarceration in Africa

The New York Times had an excellent, fairly long piece of reporting today on the situation in many (or most?) of the prisons in Africa. (Also here.) Michael Wines, who wrote it, focuses much of his attention on the situation in one prison in Lilongwe, Malawi– his dateline. But the article also has some other more general info about the terrible state of people caught in the carceral system elsewhere in Africa:

    This is life in Malawi’s high-security prisons, Dickens in the tropics, places of cruel, but hardly unusual punishment. Prosecutors, judges, even prison wardens agree that conditions are unbearable, confinements intolerably long, justice scandalously uneven.
    But by African standards, Malawi is not the worst place to do time. For many of Africa’s one million prison inmates, conditions are equally unspeakable – or more so.
    The inhumanity of African prisons is a shame that hides in plain sight. Black Beach Prison in Equatorial Guinea is notorious for torture. Food is so scarce in Zambia’s jails that gangs wield it as an instrument of power. Congo’s prisons have housed children as young as 8. Kenyan prisoners perish from easily curable diseases like gastroenteritis.
    When the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights last visited the Central African Republic’s prisons in 2000, it heard that officers had deemed 50 prisoners incorrigible. Then, dispensing with trials, they executed them.
    Even the African Commission’s special representative for inmates has not visited an African prison in 18 months. There is no money, said the representative, Vera Chirwa, a democracy activist who herself spent 12 years in Malawi jails under a dictatorship.
    “The conditions are almost the same,” Ms. Chirwa said. “In Malawi, in South Africa, in Mozambique, in almost every country I have visited. I’ve been to France, and I’ve seen the prisons there. In Africa, they would be hotels.”

Anyone who’s ever read Foucault should understand there’s an intimate connection between “modernity” and the practice of large-scale incarceration. Incarceration, I would add, is an extremely expensive option for societies to choose. In the classic model of it, prisoners are totally removed from society and therefore have to be fed, housed, and clothed by the government. Because they are removed from productive labor, and becauise they are generally able-bodied men of breadwinning age, the incarceration of one individual can result in up to ten family members losing their main means of support… Large-scale incarceration has bad enough longterm social and economic effects in a country like the US, where there are currently more than two million people incarcerated, and a further million employed in guarding them. Imagine what a burden a policy of incarceration places on a very low-income country in Africa…
I first started reflecting deeply on this subject about five years ago, when I learned that in Rwanda, the main policy the government had chosen in order to deal with the aftermath of the 1994 genocide had been one of detaining and incarcerating suspects– and that at that point more than 130,000 of that country’s 7.5 million or so people were still, six years after the end of the genocide, festering in their prisons with only a tiny number of them ever having seen the inside of a courtroom. (If you want to read my really long Boston Review article on that subject, you can find it here.)
When I was working on that article– and later, when I went to Rwanda to check out the situation for myself– I became very impressed with the work being done in several African countries by a small NGO called Penal Reform International. Michael Wines quotes the Malawi-based regional director of Penal Reform International, Marie-Dominique Parent, as saying: “Most African governments spend little on justice, and what little is spent goes mostly to the police and courts… Prisons are at the bottom of the heap.”
He also notes this very disturbing relationship:

    Paradoxically, democracy’s advent has catalyzed the problems of Africa’s prisons. Freedom has permitted lawlessness, newly empowered citizens have demanded order – and governments have delivered.
    Malawi’s prison population has more than doubled since the dictatorship ended in 1994. But its justice system is so badly broken that it is hard to know where to begin repairs…

So what is the answer? To urge governments in Africa to spend more on their prisons and court systems? Or to urge them to find alternatives to incarceration as the main “punishment of choice” in their societies.
I would say: both. But especially, given that the prison systems in most of those countries are in such a rudimentary and inhumane condition, western aid donors should be looking to explore and support the upgrading of the widest possible kinds of alternatives. I mean, there is no particular reason that “modernity” always has to come fully equipped with large prison systems, is there? And at least, in Africa, in most countries there are still some fairly robust indigenous justice and conflict-resolution mechanisms that could be conserved, modernized, and upgraded.
… Anyway, I’m glad that Michael Wines wrote that piece, and that the NYT gave it such a lot of space. So often, liberals in the US think that all that’s needed for people in low-income countries is that we should export all our own kinds of instituions there and then everything would be great. But at the same time we here in the US know that there are a lot of things terribly wrong with our own, ultra-punitive criminal-justice system. So why on earth would we want to export that to anyone? What we should do instead is proactively go out to identify, and seek to strengthen, a whole range of alternatives.

Riots in France persisting

The anger-fueled rioting in the banlieues (suburbs) around Paris and some other big cities in France has gone on every evening for the past ten days now. It seems very diffuse and ill organized and looks really tragic. Who knows at this point if it will harden into some recognizable and lasting social movement supported by the marginalized, mainly immigrant-origin families stuffed into the banlieues?
One of the friends who came to our place for dinner last night commented that while the US news broadcasts he’d seen all tended to focus on the fact that most of those rioters have been Muslim, the BBC had given a lot more stress to the fact that the anger came out of the “housing estates”– that is, to give a socioeconomic interpretation to what was happening.
Here on JWN commenter David made some reference to “the Paris intifada”. That launched an interesting discussion, which didn’t really belong on that post and should anyway have its own post, so I’ll reproduce it at the end of this post.
I’ll just note here that the anger of this generation of mainly French-born young adults from immigrant-origin families seems largely parallel to the anger of their counterparts in the immigrant-origin communities in Britain– though in France, the anger has not yet spawned a violent, Qaeda-linked underground like the one that killed 55 people in the London Underground in July.
Here in the US, members of the “white”-dominated political elite are slowly coming to grips with the idea that the country’s self-image and actual practice of social interactions needs to change to incorporate the facts of the growing empowerment of African-American and other non-white citizens, and the growing empowerment and increasing numbers of Hispanic-cultured citizens, in particular. I see it as a pretty exciting, challenging and open-ended process.
In Europe, the pressing facts of demographic change have been quite a lot slower to become reflected in the self-image and social practice of the “indigenous” and dominant white majorities. I’m not sure whether the proportion of non-“white” residents is noticeably higher in the UK and France than it is in other European countries. But it is certainly interesting that it is in those two countries– the two that maintained the largest overseas empires for so long, and that for so long even defined themselves by reference to their worldwide imperial role– that the children and grandchildren of the formerly colonized have been most bold in staking their claim to equal rights with the indigenes of the metropolis.
Bill the spouse, who has done a lot of research on the modern history of North Africa, suggests that many of the young people now rioting in the banlieues of France may well be the children and grandchildren of the harkis, the Algerian indigenese who had been impressed into the French colonial forces and who, when De Gaulle finally took the French forces out of Algeria, were allowed to retreat with them rather than face the wrath of the FLN.
As anyone who has ever read Fanon will recall, one special feature of French imperialism was the conceit that the French cultural administrators spread within their various colonies that the indigenous people could actually become “French”, if only they could learn the language of Racine and Voltaire with enough flair and become sufficiently au courant with all the latest in Parisian literary thinking. (My ex-spouse, who grew up Lebanese and went to a number of French-run schools in Lebanon, vividly recalls all the pupils being taken out of school on quatorze juillet and given little French flags to wave in the streets as they shouted “Vive la France!”)
So you could see how Algerians or other North Africans who had fought for France against the FLN, then fled to France, and had been raised with this idea that they and their families could actually, seamlessly become French, might find the reality of the situation once arrived there fairly disappointing…. the kind of disappointment that might easily harden over a further generation or two, if most of the members of that community remained on the economic, social, and political margins.
… Social change ain’t easy. Our small city of Charlottesville here in Virginia is nowadays sometimes called by its detractors the “People’s Republic of Charlottesville”. That’s because we have a strongly Democratic-dominated city administration, a general commitment (not always well implemented) to support the full empowerment of the 50% of the city’s residents who are African-Americans, a strong-ish peace movement, and a general commitment to decent, generous, liberal values.
Back in the 1950s, however, the whitefolks who dominated the city council voted to close the city schools rather than accede to the federal government’s demand that the seperate white and black school systems in the city should be integrated. The whitefolks just couldn’t see their sons and daughters getting any benefit– or even, being safe!– if they sat down in the same classrooms with Black kids. The city’s changed a lot– in its self-image, aspriation, and practice–since then. Not enough, I might say. But certainly, significantly.
Are there forces in the “indigenous” white communities in France and the UK who, jointly with immigrant-origin leaders, can spearhead some analogous moves towards far greater inclusivity? I hope so. Certainly, I hope the streets of Europe never ring again to the cries of race-hatred that dominated so many of them back in the 1930s…
Anyway, here are what Christiane (who’s Swiss) and Hammurabi wrote earlier in response to david’s comment about a Paris “intifada”:
Christiane:
Concerning the riots in Paris which are now spreading in other provincial cities, I don’t understand why you call them Intifada. No-one in France name them so, not even the participants, at least I didn’t hear it.
What we have in France has nothing to do with terrorism; it’s a wide social movement which is caused by joblessness and exclusion.
They have much more to do with the right wing policies a la neocons which were imposed on France by Chirac and above all by Sarkozy : many many funds were cut in social programs aimed at integration, while more resources were put on repression. Sarkozy developped a theory of “zero tolerance” which has produced the opposite results.
After an incident (which isn’t yet completely clear but for the fact that two young people who took refuge in an electric transformator died electrocuted – with or without the police chasing them, that is the question) the whole leftover suburbs went in flames. At first they responded to Sarkozy’s provocation, because he named them thugs to be cleaned away. But sure enough if the whole suburbs are now burning since a week, it is for other serious social reasons. Since 1968, I haven’t seen such an important social movement. Hundreds of cars are burned out. And also a police station, some schools and many public busses.
Beside the many social workers and mediators trying to cool the spirits, there are two different groups pushing to the riots : the gangs and drugs dealers holding the different suburbs, who fight to extend their territories and also perhaps, some Islamist activists.
It is not impossible that Islamist movements try to organize this social movement. But it isn’t the only force around. And Muslim movements come with different flavors. I hope that this movement will cause the fall of Sarkozy. It is well possible, because he has been so irresponsible in his provocations. On the other hand when elections take place after riots, people tend rather to vote for the right parties, for the restoration of order.
Hammurabi:
au contraire…Sarkozy understands the need to coopt the Le Pens on the far right (by taking a strong law and order position and on illegal immigration) while making the French citizens from North Africa stakeholders rather than seething “outsiders”…that is why in the home of egalite and French “grandeur”, he favors meaningful affirmative action policies… “I think some people accumulate so many handicaps that if the state does not help them, they have no chance of making it,” he explained. Europeans pride themselves on their commitment to multiculturalism but in practice there is far less of the melting pot diversity that serves as a safety valve on the other side of the Atlantic. He also favors public financing of mosques in the land of banned head scarves.
With high unemployment, an aging nativist population and an increasingly alienated and growing Muslim population, France – like many European countries – faces a demographic challenge not just to funding its generous pension and other social programs but to help prevent Islamic extremists from exploiting the situation.
… [Back to HC] Thanks so much for those contributions. Everyone is warmly invited to continue this conversation here.

Riverbend writes

Riverbend– whose book just won a good prize from a German foundation, I saw yesterday– has a new post on her blog. It makes depressing reading.
She concludes:

    We literally laugh when we hear the much subdued threats American politicians make towards Iran. The US can no longer afford to threaten Iran because they know that should the followers of Sadr, Iranian cleric Sistani and Badir’s Brigade people rise up against the Americans, they’d have to be out of Iraq within a month. Iran can do what it wants- enrich uranium? Of course! If Tehran declared tomorrow that it was currently in negotiations for a nuclear bomb, Bush would have to don his fake pilot suit again, gush enthusiastically about the War on Terror and then threaten Syria some more.
    Congratulations Americans- not only are the hardliner Iranian clerics running the show in Iran- they are also running the show in Iraq. This shift of power should have been obvious to the world when My-Loyalty-to-the-Highest-Bidder-Chalabi sold his allegiance to Iran last year. American and British sons and daughters and husbands and wives are dying so that this coming December, Iraqis can go out and vote for Iran influenced clerics to knock us back a good four hundred years.
    What happened to the dream of a democratic Iraq?

Earlier on in the post, she gives some really interesting background to the way the legacy of the 8-year Iran-Iraq war still lingers in the minds of many Iraqis. Very somber reading, the whole thing.
(Hat-tip to the amazing Susan– yes, “our” Susan from the Comments boards here at JWN– who noted this rare new offering from River in her lengthy and informative new post over at Today in Iraq. Great job, Susan!)

Red carpet for Chalabi

Well, Ahmad Chalabi’s going to be coming to Washington soon. And who is rolling out the red carpet for his “rehabilitation” there but… his old pal at the WaPo, Jim Hoagland!
Chalabi’s chutzpah in seeking a major rehabilitation in DC– after the emergence of lots of evidence has emerged that not only does he have a close political relationship with the mullahs’ regime in Teheran, but also that he has handed over significant amounts of confidential US national-security information to them– is in itself quite astounding. Right now, indeed, as he makes his way to DC, he has decided to take a stopover in Teheran. (Don’t get me wrong. I am all for seeing the easing of tensions between the US government and the regime in Teheran, and the establishment of solid means of communication between them. Ahmad Chalabi, however, is not the kind of person one would like to see anywhere near to playing an “honest broker” role of this type!)
But Chala’s chutzpah in seeking rehabilitation in DC is not so surprising– hey, this is the guy who bounced back in the Middle Eastern and global arenas after having defrauded scores of thousands of investors in his “Petra Bank” scam in Jordan in the 1980s. What amazes me is his continuing success in being able to bamboozle and hold in his camp a number of apparently intelligent and well-connected members of the western polite who are far from hanging their heads in shame at this point at the revelations of their friend’s multiple shenanigans.
Hoagland is a case in point. As Douglas McCollam noted in this important piece in the Columbia Journalism Review in July/August 2004, Hoagie had been one of the main (and apparently very willing) tools used by Chala’s exile-based “Iraqi National Congress” as it systematically tried to build up the case for the US to invade Iraq. Hoagie, it should be noted, is no starry-eyed neophyte in the world of journalism. He is a decades-long veteran of the WaPo’s “Foreign Service” who has been an “Associate Editor” of the paper for several years now. He has no excuses except pure ideology for the pugnacious and quite uncritical role he played before March 2003 as he beat the drums for war.
There is obviously a lot more to say about the irony and chutzpah of Ahmad Chalabi than I have time to say here. Lots more to say, too, about Jim Hoagland. I guess he doesn’t really like having his role investigated. CJR’s McCollum wrote that when he called Hoagie to ask for comment on the piece he was writing last year Hoagie, “who has championed the INC for years, abruptly hung up on me before calling back to apologize graciously.” (If you haven’t read what McCollum wrote about Hoagie’s role in the INC’s pre-war disinformation campaign about Saddam’s alleged links with and international Islamist terrorism, you should go back there and do so.)
And now, in his latest fauning, excuse-laden piece about Chalabi, Hoagland tries to get a sly little dig of his own in against McCollum. Using very heavy “irony” he asks:

    Chalabi? Isn’t he the aforesaid Arab con man of journalistic and political lore who tricked alert politicians such as Jay Rockefeller, and the entire CIA, into believing Hussein was moments away from blowing them to kingdom come? The same guy who provided the opportunity for shallow journalistic exposs and a magazine cover — on the Columbia Journalism Review, of all places — that were redolent with whiffs of anti-Arab stereotyping that would have been denounced if other ethnic groups had been so targeted?

The suggestion that McCollum’s piece “would have been denounced [as anti-Arab stereotyping] if other ethnic groups had been involved” is outrageous. It comes out of literally nowhere. There is no hint of ethnic stereotyping in what McCollum wrote, and Hoagie should immediately retract and apologize for that suggestion.
Hoagie goes on with the crux of how he is hoping, this time round, to “sell” his old buddy Ahmad to the US public:

    Yes, Chalabi is back, in Iraq and in Washington. He visits here this week at the invitation of an administration that listened to him before the war — except of course when he opposed the occupation and other things they wanted to do — and then tried to eliminate him from Iraqi politics in Allawi’s favor. I know, the story line gets confusing, but remember, we are in Valerie Plame deep-cover territory here.
    The visit would be a good occasion for the American public to catch up on the thing that interests Hagel — the chances of democracy in Iraq — and on how Chalabi would hurry American troops home. Rockefeller, Harry Reid and other Democrats could ask him in person how he so brilliantly tricked them, and then explain that in detail to their constituents.

Gimme a break. Time for all this tired old hack to retire, at the very least. (If not, to be aggressively investigated regarding the nature of his ties to Chalabi and the role he played in helping spread and add credibility to Chala’s disgraceful pre-war disinformation.)

Skulduggery at the Iraqi polls? ( I am “shocked, shocked!”)

Gareth Porter (JWN commenter) has written a piece for IPS stating that,

    Reports compiled by the U.S. military in Iraq from its informants and by non-governmental organisations from independent Iraqi sources provide the first detailed picture of a campaign of ballot fraud by Kurdish authorities in Nineveh province, the key to the outcome of the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum.
    They show that officials of the Kurdish Democratic Party bused non-resident Kurds to vote in polling stations in various non-Kurdish areas of Nineveh and created a climate of fear and intimidation in the province that reduced the vote against the constitution on the Nineveh plain. They also support Sunni charges of fraudulent vote totals in the province.

Porter writes,

    The final official vote total for Nineveh was 395,000 “no” and 323,000 “yes”. However the [Independent Election Commission in Iraq] in Nineveh had told the media on Oct. 16 and again on Oct. 17 that 327,000 people had voted for the constitution and only 90,000 against, with only 25 out of the 300 polling stations in the province remaining to be counted.
    Thus, between the two counts, 5,000 yes votes had apparently disappeared and 295,000 no votes had mysteriously materialised — all from only 25 polling places. No explanation has ever been provided by election authorities for those contradictory data. The U.S. military’s informant supports the view that Kurdish and Sunni vote totals in Mosul were significantly altered.
    In the towns north and east of [the province’s capital,] Mosul, the military’s reporting suggests the main factor in distorting the vote was the use by Kurdish authorities of “flying voters” and voter intimidation…

The picture appears a little unclear from this account. First of all, it is quite amazing if the IECI was in any position to give any kind of an original estimate as early as Oct 16 or Oct 17, given the weather and other conditions in the country at the time and the logistical challenges in gathering and counting so many paper ballots. If IECI people were giving estimates at that time– and I do recall something like that– then those estimates themselves can have been based on little more than thin air and wishful thinking. (Rather like Condi Rice’s “calling” of the referendum on the morning of the 16th…. What an amazing feat of non-reality-based chutzpah that was, eh?)
Oh, right. Here is an informative IPS report by Gareth Porter datelined Oct. 19, in which he reported that the IECI had claimed that 326,000 people in Nineveh had voted Yes and 90,000 had voted No.
So I guess if the IECI had been giving out such an unlikely estimate that early, pretty soon afterwards someone must have taken them aside and said, “You know, those figures are just simply not credible… You’ll have to do better than that!” So off they went and came back with the 55%-45% result: “Oh sorry, chaps, our side has still ‘won’ — even if we did it with only 45% of the total!”
One of the sources of reporting on the shenanigans in Nineveh that Porter used in his latest piece was Michael Youash of the Iraq Sustainable Democracy Project, a Washington DC-based group that is concerned with protecting the interests especially of Iraq’s most vulnerable groups, which it defines as “ChaldoAssyrians and also Turkmens, Yezidis, Shabaks and Mandaeans”. Much of Youash’s information had come, in turn, from members of those minorities inside Nineveh.
(By the way, can anyone tell me anything about the Shabaks? You know “Shabak” is the Hebrew word for the Shin Bet, and I’ve a feeling that many reports of Israeli covert activities in northern Iraq might have originated with references to members of Iraq’s own Shabak community… But no-one I’ve spoke to seems to know very much about them… )
Anyway, clearly at a time big inter-group strife in the country, members of all of its small minorities must be feeling very vulnerable, and in danger of getting run over by the nearest demographic/sectarian steamroller, whether it’s the Kurds or the Shiites or the Sunnis– or squezzed hard between two of the steamrollers… Sort of like the Gypsies/Roma in the war-torn lands of former Yugoslavia: always distrusted, always vulnerable.
But I digress. Actually, there is very little at all that sincere lovers of democratic practice can feel good about regarding the modalities, conduct, or outcome of the Iraqi referendum. Porter’s report just adds to the already depressing nature of the general picture.

‘Old’ CIA hand’s plea for the Geneva Conventions

The NYT had a good op-ed in today in which Milt Bearden, a 30-year veteran of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, made an eloquent plea for the US Supreme Court to uphold the principle that all detainees under US control should enjoy the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
From 1986 through 1989 Bearden was “the senior American intelligence officer during the final three years of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.” In the op-ed he describes how his experience persuaded him that that respect of the Geneva Conventions by the CIA and its allies there brought two notable benefits:

    1. It offered the best chance (on the grounds of reciprocity) that operatives for the US and its allies who might be taken captive by their opponents would receive something like decent treatment, and
    2. It offered the best chance that captured opponents would be kept alive if captured by CIA allies in Afghanistan; those captives might then become willing sources of intel for the CIA and its allies, and when released– either during or after the war– might become spokespeople for the view that the US was a decent, humane country. (He has a particularly good story there about Aleksandr Rutskoi.)

Well, I am sure that Milt Bearden’s insistence on strict observance of the Geneva Conventions was too frequently honored by the anti-Soviet “mujahideen” in Afghanistan only in the breach. Still, he seemed quite insistent in his piece that he and the rest of the CIA folks there had tried to enforce strict Geneva observance– and also that those attempts to uphold Geneva really helped the US effort in Afghanistan.
That was, of course, the “old”– pre-Porter Goss– CIA. Very 20th century. How much of that ethos still survives there, after Bush put his old buddy Porter Goss in as Director with instructions for a broad house-cleaning? Who knows? (Mind you, Wednesday’s story about the CIA’s global gulag did reveal that there are some present-day qualms inside the Agency about the way it treats detainees. So maybe the ‘old’ CIA is not completely dead…)
I guess, though, that this is really a measure of how bad things have become in the US imperium these days. If even wily old former CIA operatives like Milt Bearden now feel they need to speak out to protest the administration’s abuses– well!

60 percent disapproval of Bush

Oh yes! Today, the WaPo reported that its latest poll had the US public disapproving of the President’s performance in office by 60 percent to 39 percent.
Plus, this:

    several pillars of Bush’s presidency have begun to crumble under the combined weight of events and White House mistakes. Bush’s approval ratings have been in decline for months, but on issues of personal trust, honesty and values, Bush has suffered some of his most notable declines. Moreover, Bush has always retained majority support on his handling of the U.S. campaign against terrorism — until now, when 51 percent have registered disapproval.
    The CIA leak case has apparently contributed to a withering decline in how Americans view Bush personally. The survey found that 40 percent now view him as honest and trustworthy — a 13 percentage point drop in the past 18 months. Nearly 6 in 10 — 58 percent — said they have doubts about Bush’s honesty, the first time in his presidency that more than half the country has questioned his personal integrity.

And on Iraq, this:

    Iraq remains a significant drag on Bush’s presidency, with dissatisfaction over the situation there continuing to grow and with suspicion rising over whether administration officials misled the country in the run-up to the invasion more than two years ago.
    Nearly two-thirds disapprove of the way Bush is handling the situation there, while barely a third approve, a new low. Six in 10 now believe the United States was wrong to invade Iraq, a seven-point increase in just over two months, with almost half the country saying they strongly believe it was wrong.
    About 3 in 4 — 73 percent — say there have been an unacceptable level of casualties in Iraq. More than half — 52 percent — say the war with Iraq has not contributed to the long-term security of the United States.
    The same percentage — 52 percent — says the United States should keep its military forces in Iraq until civil order is restored, and only about 1 in 5 — 18 percent — say the United States should withdraw its forces immediately. In the week after U.S. deaths in Iraq passed the 2,000 mark, a majority of those surveyed — 55 percent — said the United States is not making significant progress toward stabilizing the country.

… Yesterday, here in Charlottesville, we moved to our “winter schedule” for the weekly peace vigils. Once the country comes off summer time it gets dark that much earlier in the evening. So for visibility and safety we shift the vigil to 4:30 p.m. through 5:30 p.m. In summer it’s 5 through 6.
Whenever we make our twice-yearly shift, we catch the attention of a bunch of regular rush-hour drivers who haven’t seen us there for a while. Yesterday, it was the 4:30 through 5 p.m. drivers who hadn’t seen us since spring. They seemed delighted to see us there again. Many gave prolonged honks of support or let rip with little riffs on toot-too-too-toot-toot– toot-toot!
Our honk rate has definitely gone up a lot since April.
It was the end of a beautiful, balmy afternoon. In the nearby, pedestrianized downtown area many townspeople were just hanging out, enjoying the Indian summer sunshine. A crowd of black teens were slouching around outside Christian’s Pizza, trading jokes. The street-traders in Central Place– a large proportion of whom are Tibetan immigrants– chatted among themselves quietly as their bright piles of winter scarves and hats sat unsold. A couple of moms with small kids wandered out of the new Italian gelateria licking on large waffle-cones. A few dry yellow leaves drifted down from the trees.
Peace is so amazing, and most people who enjoy it don’t even realize that!
Personally, I’m really delighted that– in the midst of all the campaigns of fear- and hate-mongering that the pro-war folks have been continuing, 18 percent of Americans now, according to that waPo poll, support an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Wow. Those people, it seems to me, see completely through all the many arguments produced by the “oh, we have to stay there to make things better” crowd and all the “Pottery Barn Rules” folks.
During the peace vigil, my friend Heather said, “Oh I can’t believe we might be here this time next year, as well.” Well yes, Heather, quite likely we will be. But I venture to suggest that our little vigil– and all the other things people in the peace movement have done over the past four years– has actually made a difference. It’s kind of good to feel that way… even if we still have a long way to go, an additional 82 percent of Americans to persuade…

Empire and the discourse of “justice”

Part 1: Pursuing “justice”:

No political leader in history ever rallied support for a project of  imperial
aggrandizement and war by declaring to his followers and the outside world
that he wanted to pursue an unjust cause.  On the contrary, every leader
who engages in war declares very loudly indeed that his cause is not only
just but also, beyond that, imperatively so.  (That is one of the many
problems with “just war” theory.  Every leader of a belligerent nation
is convinced that his cause is just: So why do wars happen at all then, if there is one single, self-evident definition of what justice is?)

George W. Bush’s present set of wars in the Global War on Terror is no
exception.  I’m sure JWN readers all remember the declaration he made, immediately after 9/11, that
“Either we’ll bring Osama Bin Laden to justice or–”  and this had a
peculiarly ominous ring to it– “we’ll bring justice to him.” How much better it would have been, though, if the US government had simply stuck to the version of “bringing OBL to justice” rather than trying to “bring justice to” him and countless other US foes around the world…

Over the past four years we’ve seen the Bush cabal pursue its campaign
of “bringing justice to” its opponents in a number of different ways, in a
number of different places.  In Afghanistan and Iraq it did so through
war, and in the case of Syria it has done so by the deployment of…
a UN-appointed “Special Prosecutor”.

The UN’s appointment of German national Detlev Mehlis to play exactly the
same investigative role in Lebanon and Syria that is played within the US
justice system by a Special Prosecutor had a couple of significant features
to it:

  1. Particularity.  Activists and leaders in political opposition
    parties get assassinated regularly throughout the world, in a number of contexts.
     But never before the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in Lebanon last
    February has the UN Security Council responded by rushing to create this
    quite unprecedented form of a judicial investigating mechanism in response
    to such an  act.
  2. The international politics of it.  “Containing” Syrian
    power had already, from August 2004 on, proven to be something that the
    Bushies and the French could agree strongly on.  After Hariri’s killing,
    upping the ante against Syria and its allies inside the Lebanese system  certainly
    looked like a campaign that could continue to help Washington and the bastions
    of “Old Europe” in France and Germany mend the fences that had earlier been
    badly torn by the Bushies’ reckless and unilateral rush to invade Iraq.

Please note that I am not arguing here that the full facts about
the killing of Hariri should not be sought out and made public, and those
reponsible tried in a court of law.  Indeed, I believe they should be.
 I am just noting some political facts about the context of the Mehlis
investigation that cannot be ignored.

Let me introduce a historical analogy…

Continue reading “Empire and the discourse of “justice””

U.S. running secret prison in East Europe

Today’s WaPo has a very disturbing story by Dana Priest in which she reveals new details about the globe-circling gulag that the CIA has run since September 2001.
At least one branch of this gulag is in a Soviet-era compound in a newly ‘democratic’ country of Eastern Europe, she writes. She adds,

    The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.
    The hidden global internment network … depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA’s covert actions.
    The existence and locations of the facilities — referred to as “black sites” in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents — are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.
    The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.
    While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

Addendum, 9:40 a.m.: Of course, it is the mistreatment that the CIA can give to its detainees that Dick Cheney is currently trying to protect, by seeking a special exemption for the CIA from the anti-torture legislation now being considered by Congress. I heard a radio interview with Sen. John McCain yesterday in which he sounded very confident that the Senate would continue to uphold the principle of no special exemptions for the CIA or anyone else from the anti-torture provision. Let’s hope so…
Priest gives a lot of details about how, starting in the days immediately after 9/11, this program of completely secret, off-the-books detentions grew rapidly, and without either oversight or much planning. Some of the detention sites previously used in it were closed down, for various reasons. (That included the “super-secret” CIA unit at Guantanamo, though as we know the military-run portion of the prison there continues to hold hundreds of detainees.)
She writes:

    “We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy,” said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. “Everything was very reactive. That’s how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don’t say, ‘What are we going to do with them afterwards?’ ”
    It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA’s internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.
    Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA’s approved “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as “waterboarding,” in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning…

So where are these helpful “host” countries? As described by Priest, one is still Afghanistan, where the CIA has run a secret detention camp called the “Salt Pit” at various different locations since 2001. Another was previously Thailand, where high-ranking Qaeda captives Abu Zubaida and Ramzi Binalshibh were both taken during 2002. “But after published reports revealed the existence of the site in June 2003, Thai officials insisted the CIA shut it down, and the two terrorists were moved elsewhere, according to former government officials involved in the matter.” (It is of course quite possible that the place held more those two CIA prisoners at the time.)
And which is the East European country that’s still involved in the program?
By my best reading of Priest’s report, it seems that while there may in the past have been more than one such country involved, at present there is at least one. She writes:

    The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

If I were a democrat in such a country and I suspected that my government was allowing the CIA to run such a prison system on the national soil , I would demand that my government cease its cooperation with this scheme immediately.
Let’s get this straight. As Priest writes straightforwardly and quite correctly, “It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States” (which was why they felt they had to seek sites not on US soil, in the first place.) So in order to save the appearance of the rule of law inside the US, the CIA has been quite happy to export its besmirchment to other, much more vulnerable countries.
For what it’s worth, if I were a democrat in Hungary, I would start asking a lot of questions about whether the CIA is running one of its “black” prisons in my country. Hungary, you will recall, was the place where in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the government rapidly acceded to US requests that it open up a training center for Ahmad Chalabi’s alleged thousands of supporters who needed some quick military training. (Fewer than 800 of them ever showed up.)
According to Dana Priest, the “black sites” have hosted the detention of “More than 100 suspected terrorists” take from various places– though she immediately notes that that number does not include prisoners picked up in Iraq. So if any significant portion of the detainees picked up in Iraq are put into the black system– as quite possibly happens to a large proportion of the non-Iraqis taken prisoner there– then the number of detainees may be quite a lot higher than simply 100.
Of the 100, Priest notes that more than 70 came to be deemed of less than high “significance”– hey, maybe some of them were completely innocent; we may never know– and those ones were “rendered” over to the untender mercies of other compliant governments.
She makes a couple of intriguing references in her piece to the emergence of some disquiet about the system among serving and former CIA officers familiar with it. (Which is no doubt what motivated some of them to seek her out and talk a little both about the program and about their doubts regarding it.)
Here’s how she concludes the piece:

    Several former and current intelligence officials, as well as several other U.S. government officials with knowledge of the program, express frustration that the White House and the leaders of the intelligence community have not made it a priority to decide whether the secret internment program should continue in its current form, or be replaced by some other approach.
    Meanwhile, the debate over the wisdom of the program continues among CIA officers, some of whom also argue that the secrecy surrounding the program is not sustainable.
    “It’s just a horrible burden,” said the intelligence official.

Look at that second paragraph there. Some CIA officers argue that the secrecy surrounding the program “is not sustainable.” What are their precise fears? That if the truth came out, the program would have to be ended? Or, that anyone who had been involved in administering it might be liable to prosecution under the laws of the countries they’ve been working in?
… At a broad level, though, you really have to wonder at the twisted logic of all the people involved in designing and running such programs. In the name of “democracy” you subvert the rule of law in other countries? In the name of “freedom” you deny even the most basic habeas corpus protections to detainees– quite possibly, for the entire rest of their lives?
Of course, it is not the “democrats” inside Hungary or any other non-American place who need to take the lead in ending this system. It should be all adherents of (small-d) democracy right here in the belly of the beast, here in the USA.